November 15, 2016 Leave a Comment
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Data Center

How To Avoid New Hyperconvergence Silos?

Hi again!

Many of you are looking to refresh your current hardware, deploying your first or second cluster of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). You are likely starting with a VDI project, virtualized infrastructure in a branch office or perhaps a cluster of applications for a specific department in the organization. Hyperconvergence allows you to dramatically streamline deployment, eliminate storage complexity, simplify daily operations and increase scaling capabilities – sounds great! Right?

Hyperconvergence is awesome. But I invite you to think strategically, looking at what happens 1-3 years down the road. You probably plan to move more applications to HCI, but at the same time already have many applications in place. Things won’t happen over night, and you are unlikely to be comfortable migrating ALL of your applications to HCI.

New silos emerging?

Many solutions in the market put you in a tough spot. To enjoy the benefits of HCI one must create new silos. There’s traditional or converged infrastructure (CI) with one set of tools that you know how to use, and then there’s HCI with separate management tools and interface. Pretty ironic given that we were trying to eliminate datacenter silos!

Single platform for complete data center strategy

Here’s where HyperFlex fits in. Cisco always takes a broad and strategic architectural approach: The same platform you love from converged infrastructure with UCS is now used for both CI and HCI. This means you can use the same UCS Manager automation for UCS AND HyperFlex clusters, streamlining daily operations and increasing infrastructure reliability. Also, since both infrastructure types play well together you can add UCS Blades or Racks to a HyperFlex cluster, expanding compute-only resources, and thus optimizing your TCO for your specific needs. In fact, the same compute-only nodes can be shifted between HCI and CI clusters based on your changing application needs, enabling dynamic utilization of resources and cloud-like experience for your infrastructure.

Check out this video for information on Cisco HyperFlex and how it fits in your overall data center architecture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fh62jIPvE0

 

 

 

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